Electromyographic Studies on the Respiratory Muscles of the Chicken

Abstract SOUM (1896), and Zimmer (1953) studied the respiratory movement of birds. Their reports have described which muscles participate in the respiratory movements, based upon the effects of sectioning and the anatomical structure of muscles in the thorax and abdomen. However, since the publication of these reports, very little systematic experimental work has been conducted on the respiratory movements of birds. As is well known, chickens lack diaphragm muscles and have well developed air sacs in the body cavities. These characteristics suggest that chickens would exhibit different respirator patterns from that of mammals or man. Generally, it is difficult to determine the actions and functions of the respiratory muscles by observation by naked eye or by the anatomical structure of the animal. Thus, this problem has been a subject of controversy for a long time. Recently, with the aid of the electromyographic technique, detailed mechanism of the respiratory movement in man …